Zoom-boing
Platinum Member
Interesting article. GOP needs to get its shit together.
"Here is a simple fact: right now, the GOP is on the road to defeat, set to be overwhelmed by a superior digital voter microtargeting operation on the other side, and hamstrung by a refusal to focus on the future of predictive analytics and Big Data application technology. These are the things which translate through e-mail and online contacts, into both donations and (even more importantly) boots on the ground in the thick of a general election campaign: door-to-door mobilization. Everything else — the theater, the social media back-and-forths, the SNL appearances and Sunday morning show interviews — is almost meaningless. The 2016 pool of potential GOP nominees represents the deepest reserve of young Presidential-level talent the Republican Party has had in ages, and none of it may matter because while the engineers and developers on the Democratic side aren’t necessarily personally invested in Hillary or Bernie, they do believe in the greater Cause. And, more to the point, these are the sorts of people who simply enjoy solving equations and problems.
GOP candidates are facing a mammoth two-pronged problem: 1) the failure of will and lack of funds to field large data-driven get-out-the-vote operations, and; 2) Hillary Clinton’s well funded allies in Silicon Valley, specifically Eric Schmidt and Google. On top of that, this is a party whose candidates look like they are playing catch-up in the areas of digital operations and field mobilization.
To give you an idea of how far behind the Republican Party is in the digital age of voter-targeting, realize this: the GOP didn’t even create a position for a Chief Technology Officer until after the 2012 election, when they looked to former Facebook senior engineer Andrew Barkett, who moved on to work on digital ops for the Jeb! Bush campaign. It took a disaster as large as Mitt Romney’s ORCA operation, an analytical Titanic, to wake the Republicans from of a pre-digital opioid slumber that saw their rival campaign operation carry Obama to consecutive victories on the backs of 20/30-something developers who were busily coding, farming data, and analyzing and applying the results behind the scenes. (Team Chicago had about 200 digital staffers to Romney’s 50.) The GOP undertook a sort of digital boot camp after the failures of 2008 and 2012 that certainly helped in 2014. But how well that translates over to 2016 is still a shaky unknown — midterm cycles are not at all like the massive pressure of Presidential election cycles — and as far as individual campaigns are concerned, the outlook isn’t good."
How to Build a Digital Elephant: The GOP’s Biggest Obstacle in 2016 | The Wilderness™ | Viral Politics Done Differently
"Here is a simple fact: right now, the GOP is on the road to defeat, set to be overwhelmed by a superior digital voter microtargeting operation on the other side, and hamstrung by a refusal to focus on the future of predictive analytics and Big Data application technology. These are the things which translate through e-mail and online contacts, into both donations and (even more importantly) boots on the ground in the thick of a general election campaign: door-to-door mobilization. Everything else — the theater, the social media back-and-forths, the SNL appearances and Sunday morning show interviews — is almost meaningless. The 2016 pool of potential GOP nominees represents the deepest reserve of young Presidential-level talent the Republican Party has had in ages, and none of it may matter because while the engineers and developers on the Democratic side aren’t necessarily personally invested in Hillary or Bernie, they do believe in the greater Cause. And, more to the point, these are the sorts of people who simply enjoy solving equations and problems.
GOP candidates are facing a mammoth two-pronged problem: 1) the failure of will and lack of funds to field large data-driven get-out-the-vote operations, and; 2) Hillary Clinton’s well funded allies in Silicon Valley, specifically Eric Schmidt and Google. On top of that, this is a party whose candidates look like they are playing catch-up in the areas of digital operations and field mobilization.
To give you an idea of how far behind the Republican Party is in the digital age of voter-targeting, realize this: the GOP didn’t even create a position for a Chief Technology Officer until after the 2012 election, when they looked to former Facebook senior engineer Andrew Barkett, who moved on to work on digital ops for the Jeb! Bush campaign. It took a disaster as large as Mitt Romney’s ORCA operation, an analytical Titanic, to wake the Republicans from of a pre-digital opioid slumber that saw their rival campaign operation carry Obama to consecutive victories on the backs of 20/30-something developers who were busily coding, farming data, and analyzing and applying the results behind the scenes. (Team Chicago had about 200 digital staffers to Romney’s 50.) The GOP undertook a sort of digital boot camp after the failures of 2008 and 2012 that certainly helped in 2014. But how well that translates over to 2016 is still a shaky unknown — midterm cycles are not at all like the massive pressure of Presidential election cycles — and as far as individual campaigns are concerned, the outlook isn’t good."
How to Build a Digital Elephant: The GOP’s Biggest Obstacle in 2016 | The Wilderness™ | Viral Politics Done Differently
